It should come as no surprise that I’m a fan of crunching data to spot trends and patterns in award availability. And it turns out that, when I can, I like to collect a lot of that data for processing. Being able to answer questions like, “How far in advance does ANA’s flight 11 ORD-NRT have F space open?” seems like useful information to me. If you started searching on 1 January 2014 for first class award space on that particular flight any day in May 2014 you could have found a seat on 8 of 31 days in the month. Alas, the furthest out the space showed was 20 days. And that was only for one travel date. Most of it showed up closer than that. Oh, and that last date where space was consistently open was the Friday before Memorial Day weekend.
I’m still fine-tuning the data queries (a lot of making this chart was way more manual than I’d do for bigger data sets) but I’m finding some of the info quite interesting.
More to come as I better uncover the details of the data. And I’m over 130mm rows right now, so there’s a lot to query.
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Tried booking F or J class from NRT to anywhere in the US and space is ZERO using OW and USDM. JAL seems to not be opening up any space at all except the odd Y seat.
Frustrating.
I snagged ANA11 F about two months out a few months back.
Was also able to get 2x JL LAX-NRT F about five months in advance, swapped it to ORD-NRT F one month in advance.
Can not see any pattern.
as always, Seth, your analytic approach and contributions are much appreciated. looking forward to the full 130mm report.
I’m dying to hear about LAN. 🙂